MCLEAN BIBLE CHURCH DECEMBER 4, 2011 PASTOR LON SOLOMON

Transcription

1 MCLEAN BIBLE CHURCH DECEMBER 4, 2011 PASTOR LON SOLOMON >>LON SOLOMON: We're studying the book of goods, actually, in chapters 1 to 3 which is what we covered so far, God has given us a panoramic look at the early days of mankind. So far we've seen number 1: how God created the word exnihilo, out of nothing. Number 2: how He created everybody on the earth. Number 3: how He placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Number 4: how Satan tempted them and they fell. Number 5: we talked about the multifaceted consequences of the fall. Number 6: we talked about God's promise of the Messiah, the seed of a woman who would crush Satan and redeem mankind. And number 7: we saw how God expelled Adam and Eve out of the garden. Just before God expelled them from the Garden of Eden, Genesis 321 told us the Lord made coverings of skin for Adam and Eve and clothed them, symbolizing he was covering their sin. What God was trying to do is to teach Adam and Eve the primary principle upon which his plan of salvation for the human race was going to work. And that principle was the principle of substitutionary atonement, meaning that God will accept an innocent substitute like these two animals, dyeing in the sinner's place to atone for that person's sin in God's sight. 1st Peter 3:18, it's the just for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty, it's the substitute for the real offender. The Bible teaches us that temporarily that innocent substitute could be an animal, but that ultimately, eventually it had to be the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Whew! That's a lot to get into three chapters. The Lord did it, though. If you missed any of that, I want to urge you to go to our book store and pick up a CD and catch up with us after we're done or go online to our website. You can download for free or podcast any of our messages. Kind of get up to speed. What we want to do today is we want to move into Genesis Chapter 4 where God tells us how things began to go in the post Garden of Eden world. We are going to talk today about Cain and Abel. After we talk about them, we are going to bring all of that forward and we are going to talk about, well, what difference does that make for you and me today? So are you ready? Here we go, Genesis Chapter 4:1: The man, Adam, had relations with his wife Eve and she conceived and gave birth to Cain and she said I have gotten a manchild with the help of the Lord. Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel and Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. Many years passed now. In fact, the two boys have

2 grown up. The events of the rest of this chapter occur, as best we can figure out from the Bible, both boys are about 100 years old. Verse 3: So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the Lord from the fruit of the ground. But Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. In other words, Abel brought an animal sacrifice. A blood offering to God, just the way God had instructed and taught Adam and Eve in the garden to do it. Verse 4: And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering God had no regard. So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell. He became disheartened. You say, Lon, wait a minute, stop. You say Lon, I mean, it seems logical to me, doesn't it to you, that Adam and Eve would have taught their boys about the principle of substitutionary atonement that God taught them in the garden. Doesn't that seem logical? Sure, it does. It seems like God, that Adam and Eve would have taught their children about bringing an innocent animal, about a blood sacrifice in order to approach the Lord. Doesn't that seem logical? Yes, it does. You say, so Lon, my question is, why would Cain not do this? Why would he rebel against God's clear instructions? Well, friends, I can answer that question in two words. The answer is: Sin nature! You see, when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, they brought upon themselves a sin nature that they passed on to every single member of their race. We inherit it from birth. This sin nature is what drives us to rebel against God. We find this sin nature described for us in Isaiah 53:6: All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to -- what's the next three words? his own way. There it is, the sin nature in all of its glory. Our own way. This is why we have murders and kidnappings and drug abuse and sex scandals and white collar crimes, psychologists and anthropologists and criminologists can look wherever they want to look for an explanation of the crime of the world, but the Bible in simple terms gives us the answer. The answer is that the heart of man is diseased. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, because every human being has a sin nature which will not be cured except for those of us who are followers of Christ when we get our new bodies when the Lord Jesus returns. The point here is that Cain had this sin nature. And this is why he rebelled against God. And this is why he tried to approach God as Isaiah 53 said, his own way. Verse 6: the Lord said to Cain, "why are you angry and why

3 has your countenance fallen? I told you how to approach me. If you do right, will not your countenance be lifted up? If you get the right kind of offering, a blood offering and bring it to me, I'll have atonement, just like Abel s. If you do not do right, sin is crouching at your door and its desire is for you, but you must master it. Suddenly, Cain faces an enormous crossroads in his life. He has two choices: Either he can repent of his rebellion. He can surrender his will to God and do it God's way or he can keep rebelling and end up doing something stupid. What did he do? Let's read. Cain said to his brother Abel let's go out in the field and while they were there, Cain rose up against his brother, Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, where is your brother Abel? And Cain said: I don't know. Am I my brother's keeper? God said to Cain, what have you done? Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. Now cursed are you, Cain. I will drive you from the ground that opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. By the way, may I point out that Cain is the first human being God ever cursed. Remember in the Garden of Eden, God cursed the serpent and he cursed Satan. He punished Adam and Eve, but he never cursed them. No, this is the first person he ever curses. When you work the ground, Cain, it will no longer yield its crops could you. Cain says behold you have driven me away and hidden your face from me and I will be a vagrant and wanderer on the earth and it will come about that whoever fine me will kill me. But the Lord said to Cain, not so. For if anyone kills you, he will suffer vengeance seven times over. Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the Lord's presence and lived in the land of Nod to the east of Eden. Now, that's as far as we want to go in the passage today because it's time for us to stop now and ask our most important questions. So, all of you in the Edge community, all of you around the world on the Internet campus, all of you at Loudon and Tysons and Prince William, are we ready? This is a December, a Thanksgiving so what and a Christmas so what? Are we ready? Here we go, one, two, three. (Audience yells: So what?) >>LON SOLOMON: Very nice. You say, Lon, so what? Everybody knows the story of Cain and Abel. I appreciate what you've said, but I'm never going to live to be 100 years old. What difference does any of this make to me? Let's talk about that, shall we? We said here, folks, that

4 the presenting problem in Genesis Chapter 4 is that Cain tried to approach God his own way with the vegetables of human effort instead of the substitutionary blood of an animal. But folks, this problem was fixable. It was fixable! Remember what God said to him? God said: Cain, all you've got to do is repent and go get an animal and come back and slaughter that animal the way I told you and I will have regard for your offering like I did Abel's. This was a fixable problem. But Cain chose not to do that. The reason is that there's something else going on in this chapter that explains Cain's actions. Something else that explains his refusal to go get an animal and why he killed his brother Abel. I want to show you what that other thing is. Okay, are we ready to look at this? Let's remember now that up until Noah's flood, mankind was not allowed by God to eat meat. Did you know that? Yeah, Genesis 9:3: Every moving creature alive shall now be food for you. I give them to you as I gave you green plantsnext word? Before. Uh huh. Cain and Abel were vegetarians. So was everybody in the world up to the time of Noah. In fact, in light of this verse in Genesis 9, they were probably Vegan and ate no meat products at all. In light of that, does it strike you strange that the Bible would call Cain a keeper of flocks? Does that strike you as strange? Why keep cows, goats, sheep, flocks of anything if they were of no use for food? Why do that? The only answer I can figure out, Abel did this because people had to go somewhere to get the animals they needed to sacrifice to the Lord. So they either, people would either be forced to go out and catch a wild animal which is not the easiest thing in the world or they could go to Abel and buy an animal. Does that make sense? Hello! Does that make sense? Okay, good. Now, transfer, Cain, what was Cain? What did he do for a living? He was a farmer. Yeah, so when he wanted to sacrifice an animal to the Lord, who did he have to go to buy his animal from? Abel, his brother, that's right. The Bible tells us, folks, there was trouble in river city between Cain and his brother Abel. There was a sinister evil inside of Cain towards Abel. He was jealous. He was envious. He was resentful. He had hostility towards his brother. You say why? What logical reason would there be why Cain would be jealous of Abel. I don't know, does jealousy always have a logical reason? Does resentment always have a logical reason? It doesn't. So here comes Cain in Genesis 4. He brings his offering of the best of his field, his vegetables to the Lord. The Lord

5 rejects them. He accepts Abel's offering. He rejects Cain's offering and finally, Cain, I believe, his anger, his resentment, his jealousy boiled over and he said, I'm not going to humble myself and go to my brother. I'm not going to go there and buy a animal from him. Forget it, I'm not going to do that. All that led him to do something really stupid. When God said to Cain, Genesis 4:7, that there's sin crouching at your door like a lion and you must master it, what sin do you think he was talking about? Friends, he was talking about the sin of jealousy and resentment and hatred and hostility for his brother that God could see was seething in the heart of Cain. He warned Cain: You better master this. Cain didn't. As we can see, the results were tragic. Now, I want to leave Cain and Abel and I want us to move forward to the 21 st century. I want to go from preaching to meddling. Can I do that? Now I want to talk about you and me. Jealousy, resentment towards other people. Hey, folks, these are not just problems Cain had, uh huh. The Bible says that these are outworkings of the flesh. These are an intrinsic part of our sinful human nature. Listen, Galatians 5:21 says now, the out workings of the flesh are these, I am morality, sensuality, sexual, idolatry and witchcraft, spiritual. Watch now, hostility, discord, jealousy, dissension, strife and envy. There are six here, circumstances sins listed that are all outgrowths of the sin of jealousy, envy and resentment, outcroppings of it. The Bible tells us this is part of our inbred sinful nature. It's something we all have inside of us. It's something that lurks in the deepest recesses of our hearts and that we all secrete from deep within. Shakespeare called it the green sickness. You ever wonder where we got the phrase green with envy? We got it from Shakespeare. The green sickness and we all got it. But just to make sure we are all on the same page, can we define what we are talking about? What this thing is? What is this jealousy and resentment? It is the thing that resent what others have and even what they are. Number 2: it's the thing that causes us to flinch on the inside every time their name is even mentioned around us. It's that thing that causes us, number 3: to never have a good word to say about them. Number 4: to take pleasure in their every fault. Number 5: to hope that they stumble. And number 6: to rejoice when they do. Now, this is commonly, most commonly directed at family members, this feeling. Brothers, sisters, brother-in-laws, sister-in-laws. But it can be directed at coworkers, at the neighbors, at

6 fellow students, roommates, and it's ugly. Folks, it is so ugly that most of us as civilized people are too embarrassed to admit openly that we really feel this way about somebody, unless you're on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. They don't care. But other than those ladies, most of us are far too embarrassed to admit it publicly, we camouflage it. We know it's there. It lives in our hearts. The most serious part of all is not just that it's sin and not just that it's patently offensive to God, but just as serious is the fact that if we don't deal with this in our hearts before the Lord, sooner or later it will boil over in us just like it did in Cain and it will plunk us into doing something or saying something that we will regret for the rest of our lives, just as Cain did. You say all right, Lon, so let's say you're right about this. I'm not saying you're right that I got it, but let's just say you may be right. Let's say maybe this does live inside of me. I'm not saying it does, but I have a friend I know that this lives inside of. (Laughter.) >>LON SOLOMON: So for my friend, what advice would you give to my friend about how to deal with this before the Lord? Can we get real here? Look, this lives inside of every one of us. Yes, I have a four-step Biblical process for how to deal with this. If you honestly really have never had and don't feel any resentment, any envy, any jealousy, any of these green sickness feelings for anyone, you are now excused. God bless you, have a nice day. Anybody need to go? (Chuckles.) >>LON SOLOMON: Yeah, well me neither. How do we deal with this stuff? Here we go, I have a four-step process and it's quick. Step number 1 is we must openly admit that we have the problem. Psalm 32 David said when I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away and my strength was drained away as in the heat of the summer. This is what this sin will do to us, mu friends. Then I admitted my sin to you, to you, God, David says. I did not cover up my iniquity. Friends, as ugly as jealousy and resentment and hatred towards others is, and it is, step one, we have to stop justifying it and excusing it and stop pretending it's not really there. We have to confess it openly to the Lord and admit that we have a disease in our heart towards this person that needs to be cured. If we don't get there, there's nothing else to do. Many times, there is the hardest step. It is so ugly. We have to admit this about ourselves.

7 Number 2: once we get there, then we have to want to solve the problem. We've got to want to be free. You say, well, Lon, why wouldn't anyone in their right mind want to be free of this? I don't know, but I'll tell you I met lots of people who don't want to be free of it, who love chewing on that person on the inside, who love rooting against that person on the inside. They don't want to be free of it. They enjoy doing it. If that's you, we're done. We can t go any farther. Friends, all of us need to take seriously God's warning to Cain. He said the sin of jealousy is crouching like a lion at your door, Cain. If you don't get on top of it, sooner or later it is going to destroy you. It is like a cancer in your soul. It is going to drive you into doing or saying something that you will be sorry for. We've got to hear what God's telling us about the cancerous nature and the danger of this thing living in our heart. Number 3: you say all right, Lon. Say I'm willing to admit it before the Lord. Say I'm willing to say, Lord, you're right, I've got to get this out of me. It's a disease. I need it out. Now what do I do? Third, we have to attack the problem properly. Spiritually. Say what do you mean by that? Remember what Galatians Chapter 5:17 said? It said that jealousy is not just a bad habit like sucking your thumb or biting your fingernails. It is instead an outworking, the Bible says, of our sin nature. As such, it is a spiritual problem. And spiritual problems must be dealt with spiritually. The flesh can't fix the flesh. No amount of BF Skinner behavior modification will fix this. It's not just walking out your door and saying: I'm not going to jealous, I'm not going to think that, I'm not going to be envy just, I'm not going to hope... that's not going to help this, that's not going to solve this because the flesh can't fix the flesh. Friends, if we want this fixed we have to go to the Holy Spirit himself. Only his power can mortify this evil inside of us. This is why David said Psalm 51:10, create in me a clean God, O God, because I can't change my heart. Galatians 5:16, Paul said walk in the power of the Holy Spirit, spiritual power, and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh. If we want this fixed in our heart towards that person, that we feel it, that we have to day-by-day, moment by moment in prayer have to be asking the Holy Spirit to mortify this inside of our hearts spiritually by his spiritual power and we must depend upon Him and Him alone to do it. We have to walk out our door saying Lord, I do feel this way about this person, You know I'm going to feel this way about this person, but by the power of the Holy Spirit mortify this in me today, nullify this in me today, help me rise above this today.

8 You say how is the Holy Spirit going to do that? I don't know! I have no idea how He does it. What difference does it make? The only difference is that He does it. Friends, God will do this for you if you want it done. You say all right, Lon, that's great. So I admit I've got the problem, yes. And I come to the place I really want to be free. Yes. And I depend upon the power of the spirit instead of my own fleshly power to beat this in me towards that person. Yes. You say, Lon, that's great, but you know what? How am I going to prevent myself from feeling this way about another person in the future? Okay, so maybe I get over it with my brother or maybe I get over it with my sister. But down the road what is going to prevent me from feeling this way towards somebody else? Oh, that's a great question and that leads to step number four. How do we stay out of this trap, this cancer going forward? Number four, we do it. Step number four, by learning to see life through the lens of God's sovereignty. What does that mean? Well, Jeremiah 29:11, for I know the plans I have for-- what is the next word? You! Not somebody else. I know the plans I have for you, personally. And I love what David said in Psalm 139. He said all the days ordained for me. Not somebody else, are written in your book, Lord. They were written there when yet there wasn't a one of them. When we have our eyes on God's sovereignty, what that means is that we understand that God has a plan for me and for you. God has written all of my days and your days before there was a one of them that existed. Nobody else, in what God does for them, is going to have any effect on what God already has planned for you and for what God has planned for me. To put another way, God is going to put you and me where his plan calls us to be regardless of anybody else. Their going up won't keep you down and you don't need to put them down in order for you to go up. What happens to them makes no difference. God has a plan for you. They have nothing to do with it. You say what about their schemes and all their machinations to try to keep me down? And all of their intrigue and plotting? Hey, God is bigger than all of that, come on! You think that's going to stop God from putting you where you need to go? You're kidding, right? They're going where He says they're going and that's all there is to it. When we see people. We have to have our eyes on the sovereignty of God and look at them and smile when they try to do things and we need to say: You know what? You are so inconsequential.

9 (Chuckles.) >>LON SOLOMON: Now, you may not want to say it out loud. (Laughter.) >>LON SOLOMON: But we need to be able to say in our heart: You are so inconsequential and don't you understand? God has a plan for me, and you are so inconsequential. Friends, what is there to be envy just of, doesn't matter. When we are living our lives with the sovereignty of God, not on the plotting of people or the actions of people, but our eyes on the sovereignty of God, peel can treat us any way they want, there is no reason to be hostile or resentful. They are inconsequential. All right? You understand? Let's summarize. Let's be honest and admit that all of us here struggle with envy and jealousy and resentment towards other people. The great news of the Bible is that God has given us a way to get free and stay free of that. Admit that we have feelings towards those people. Number 2: wanting to be set free and coming to God with that. Number 3: attacking the problem spiritually and allowing the Holy Spirit to mortify these evil feelings in our heart. Then we stay free by seeing all of life through the lens of God's sovereignty. Let me just say in closing that I have found that the worst kind of bondage in the world is bondage to hatred and resentment and jealousy of other people. And conversely, I have also found the greatest freedom in the world is the freedom to say with Apostle Paul Romans 12:18, as much as it lies with me, Paul says, as much as it lies with me, I am at peace with all men. If you can say that, as much as it lies with me, I am at peace with all men, there is a freedom in that that is unmistakable. That's where God wants to get us, folks. If we follow these steps, He will. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, we are sinful people. We don't mean to be as bad as we are, but we've got this thing called a sin nature that drives us to do things, Lord, that are ugly, nasty, embarrassing and we're ashamed of. But Lord, thank You that the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives as believers is greater than our flesh. Thank you, Lord, when we depend on Your power to mortify these evil things that live inside of us. We can live above them and avoid doing the kind of stupid, self destructive things that Cain did. So Lord, help us to walk in the Spirit, to depend on the power of the Spirit each and every moment of each and every day. Help us walk with our eyes on you, Lord. Not on people but on you and your sovereignty through this world knowing that You have a plan for us and that no one in this world is going to

10 have a thing to do with that plan not coming true. So God, speak to us deeply, encourage our hearts today, and liberate us, Lord, from these evil feelings that are like a cancer in our soul. We pray these things in Jesus' name. And what do God's people say? Amen! (Audience responds "Amen"). >>LON SOLOMON: Have a good week. God bless you. (Music playing.) *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***